Thriller Film Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our media product challenges, uses and develops forms and conventions in our own way to make it different from other films. We challenged the use of showing a still of a photograph to symbolise something important by adding a flash before the photo to make it seem like the picture has just been taken. The photo is a polaroid picture of a dead body at the scene of the murder, this creates tension because the audience doesn't know who killed him or how he died. We chose to show this as a photograph rather than film it because we wanted it to seem like a police scene crime. We challenged the idea of a scar on Alistares face by making the shape of the scar a Z shape and putting it in our title as a captial letter to make it stand out, this links the two together and makes you think is Alistare the one with the 'Mysterious Gaze'. This makes him a suspect for the murders, which helps the real murderer divert the accusations away from her.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Our main social group was the community, which we chose to be very small and close. We wanted it to be like this because everybody knows everybody else which would cause more panic if there are murders and gives the audience a wider range of people to suspect. This represents a community to be very trusting and helpful but not when something bad is happening. We included a young social group and contrasted it with an old social group, this brought out more characteristics of these characters. Our main examples of this are Ariel, the young, hippie, quiet girl, and Christian, the old, nagging next door neighbour. This represents the clash between young and old social groups which everyone can relate to because older people have grown up from the young social group and the young social group will grow up to be the older social group. Relationship groups played a big part in our film, Faith and Chases' relationship being the one that stands out the most because they are a couple but as well as romance relationships there are friend relationships mainly between Faith and Imogen.

What kind of media distribute your media product and why?
We chose Lionsgate Entertainment because they have distributed thrillers and horrors, so they already have and audience into the thriller genre. It is also a well known company that are well funded.

Who would be the audience for your media product?
Our audience would be late teens to adult, 16-35, because this is the target audience of the thriller genre and the stereotypes would be relateable to this age group.

How did you attract/address your audience?
Using our questionnaires we found out things like which age certificate is more appealing and why and we got a mixture of 15 because younger people can see them and 18 because there wont be as much censorship. We also found out which setting is preferred, this attracts the audience because a mysterious setting leaves things to be imagined and makes the audience want to see it to see what its about. In our film we put a car screech at the beginning, this attracts the audience because they don't know who was in the car or why they had to stop suddenly or if anyone died.

What have you learnt about technologies from the proccess of constructing this product?
While filming with the camera I have learnt that when filming the lighting is darker than you actually think so you have to make sure it will be bright enough when you put it on the computer. We delt with this by turning on more lights if it was too dark, use backlight to create confusion and ghostly effect and when outside got the sun to over expose the frame so it only shows parts of faces at time to show it was a happy period but things were never going all be right. Also when filming outside the wind was a problem for the microphone which we didnt realise while filming. When our film was uploaded the computer programme was easy to use but for some transitions we wanted them to last longer, e.g. a fade, but because the clips before and after were to short we had to cut the transition time down. I learnt about creating our own music and sound effects and importing them onto our film, using the wave and volume levels to control the layering of the sound.

Looking back at you preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
I think I have gained a better understanding of the sound and how it effects the mood and how it subconsiously makes the audience feel; sound can also tell the audience something without having it in speech. I have also learnt more about mise-en-scene and that audience see the smallest things that you don't think they will notice, such as reflection in windows/mirrors and slight moves of the camera when its meant to be still. I am more aware off using a variety of camera angles and shots, and how generally in a conversation there will be a shot reverse shot.